


Rules and Roles

by storiesfortravellers



Category: White Collar
Genre: Boss/Employee Relationship, Class Issues, Community: kink_bingo, F/F, F/M, Politics of kink, Race, Roleplay, Sexual Fantasy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-08
Updated: 2012-07-08
Packaged: 2017-11-09 10:11:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/454318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/storiesfortravellers/pseuds/storiesfortravellers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the “class fantasies” square for kinkbingo.</p><p>Diana occasionally likes a rich girl/working class guy roleplay scenario. </p><p>Thank you to A for the beta.</p><p>Includes problematic discussions of race, class, and possibly sexuality.  Please see end notes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rules and Roles

“You dropped an ice cube, miss,” the poolboy said.

“So pick it up,” she said.

The poolboy knelt beside her chair and picked it up. Soon she felt the frozen cube travelling up her leg, a slow, wet curvature of slippery coldness that made her body arch.

The ice lingered at the inside of her knee, a bit too long. “And who told you to stop there?” she said imperiously, still not even bothering to look at him.

He moved the ice cube along the inside of her thigh then, a strong hand on her knee, gently – carefully, devotedly – spreading her thighs just slightly farther apart to give him better access.

Diana smiled. Looked like the poolboy was going to provide good service after all.

 

=====

When Diana was a teenager, and she spent most of her time stuck in some hotel, she almost never met girls her age. The children of guests were highly scheduled with enrichment activities, and apparently those other girls weren’t quite as good as Diana was at only attending the ones she wanted.

There were always a few boys of her age, though, in those hotels, sons or nephews of employees who were hired to check on the ice machines or clean the pools. There were rarely girls in these jobs; maybe the jobs were thought of as “masculine” work; maybe some adults just didn’t want to leave a teenage girl unattended every day in an upscale hotel.

After an initial shyness, she started making an effort to talk to these boys, her curiosity and isolation pushing her forward. Often they were intimidated by her, having heard that they should never ‘bother’ the daughters of VIP guests, or perhaps just wary that she were some spoiled girl there to get them fired for fun. But she found that just showing them that she was just a normal, fun girl with tomboyish tendencies usually broke the ice pretty well. Sometimes, if they seemed shy, she would challenge them to an arm wrestling contest. If they weren’t mad at her for winning, then they usually became friends, since Diana had evidence that they weren’t a jerk, and they had evidence that she wasn’t snobby and definitely wasn’t some delicate, uptight girl that they couldn’t act like themselves around.

And since they were both teenagers dumped into a building full of beds, sometimes these brief friendships came with benefits. Both her loneliness and her teenage hormones allowed her to overlook the fact that, well, they weren’t girls. 

Maybe not overlook. She definitely wished there were more poolgirls in upscale hotels. She didn’t ever forget that it was a boy, that it was a male body, that the things she hoped to find when she rather aimlessly groped simply weren’t there. But, well, a boy going down on her while she imagined the lips of her favorite riot grrl singer definitely worked in a pinch. 

And it was made considerably hotter than it would be by the fact that these boys were forbidden fruit.

Her snob of a father would _hate_ seeing them near her, if he were ever around to see it. And the boys, too, acted like they were breaking some rule, and she felt as if she learned much about them by seeing if breaking a rule filled them with anxiety or glee.

When Diana, as an adult, looked back on these early sexual explorations, she felt a bit embarrassed. 

More than a bit, actually. 

The analytical side of her (the political side of her) had serious questions about what made her like such stereotypical fantasies of social class. 

When she was young, she had felt a degree of envy for some of these boys, as they would talk casually about going to ballgames with their parents, or listening to their father yell at them every night for not cleaning their room. 

She fell prey to a romanticism, a delusion that working class men are simply more authentic, more solid, more sincere than other men. A man in a suit had an agenda; a man in dirty jeans had an honest heart. He was rugged, strong, dependable, not like Diana’s father and his friends, who cared for nothing more than presenting a good face to the right social circles, who would act cool in public but in private throw tantrums at every perceived sign of disrespect.

This perception was, of course, ridiculous. Diana knows that now. She knows that it’s the ultimate sign of privilege to fantasize that people with less money and advantage are simple and sweet, that their lives are so very happy and easy, that they don’t have all the same shit to deal with as everyone else but with oppressive financial worries on top of it. But some little part of that fantasy may have lingered, because when she met a nice, smart guy with a working class accent who was willing to treat her like just one of the guys, she almost always got a little turned on. 

As she had gotten older, of course, she had serious relationships with people (almost all women) of varying backgrounds, income levels, ethnicities, and sexual identities. Those teen experiences became more and more distant, and Diana began to indulge more and more in thoughts of the fantasy than the reality. Soon enough she discovered that there was a particular situation that really did it for her: she liked being the spoiled, rich girl who gets serviced by the working class boy. 

Not for real, of course. But as fantasy, as roleplay, it drove her desire in a way that nothing else involving men ever had.

Of course, when she was _actually_ a teenager having sex with working class boys, she was a down-to-earth girl who treated everyone with respect, just like Charlie taught her. (Charlie, by the way, had a lovely working class London accent, not quite Cockney but something close). But as she got older, she had to admit, the poolboy and bellboy fantasies became more like pornographic fantasies, more like jutting archetypes of sex-money-power, than anything resembling her real experiences.

And every once in a while, she needed it.

Christie didn’t mind. There are straight men who need to get slapped around by a big muscular guy every few months. There are gay men who occasionally like to sleep on a woman’s breasts. And if Diana wanted to be the forbidden rich girl who uses and tosses away a stockboy or go-for every once in a while, that was okay, too. 

Of course DIana still felt a little uncertain about how she liked it, why she liked it, even as she knew that some of these questions were perilously close to the attitude of those crowds who thinks that sexuality should fit into narrow little boxes. And then there was the thing that she never admitted to anyone but Christie, the part she that made her dread the thought of treating someone like her as 'lowly' and unimportant. It felt wrong just thinking about it. It's not like Diana could ever say this to anyone (except Christie), but Diana had grown up in a family of wealthy, powerful black people who very sincerely believed that working class black people were lower than them and should be treated as such. They claimed that it was in large part the failings of poor black people that kept racism going, that gave ‘all’ of them a bad name. And they felt much the same way about other working class minorities – that it was beneath them to “overly identify” with such people. And while she had never bought into that (again, Charlie’s good influence), the thought of acting out something like that scenario made her feel a little nauseated. 

Christie, while accepting, did once (when Diana pulled the admission out of her) admit that maybe, possibly, it was slightly a little bit that Diana had a tiny, repressed, totally understandable need to have the admiration -- the approval -- of the "regular guys." Diana had spent so many years as a kid trying not to be outcast for being different – not white, not feminine, not straight, not docile, more interested in guns than proms – too rich, too assertive, too connected, too good at school -- that it felt good to imagine being embraced by straight white working class guys, that it validated her in some way. People want the thing they’ve been denied, she knew. But on the other hand, what she got out of these scenes wasn’t a sense of validation. It was something more treacherous than that, and more satisfying

Christie suggested that maybe it was actually that Diana found the reversal delightfully subversive. Maybe it was empowering, or even sexually liberating, to see someone straight and white and male and all the other things that certain groups like to imagine are the “typical, real America,” and to act out a scenario where none of their privilege matters and all of hers does. 

It was an interesting theory. But Diana wasn’t sure.

Ultimately, though, they both decided it didn’t matter why. And it didn’t even matter all that much if it were problematic, if Diana was fantasizing about some authentic hotel boy because of her privilege or because she was just re-enacting her youth. Neither of them believed that kinks had to have one clear reason, one direct etymology, and, when it came down to it, neither of them believed that someone should deny an important aspect of their sexuality that didn’t directly hurt anyone. 

But it wasn’t always easy to find someone who really understood that it was never going to be more than one night every few months. Someone whom Diana and Christie both knew well enough to trust. 

Not really a long list. 

Still, Diana was surprised at Christie’s suggestion. Shocked, really.

=====

He had a slight working class accent, a quite pleasant one, though Diana only knew the exact geography of it because he told her. 

And he was definitely responsible, discreet, and safe. 

He would naturally play into some of Diana’s buttons for this particular fantasy – he was good-looking but not overly pretty, he had strong arms and hands, he was smart, honest, straightforward, down to earth. Some people might even use the word ‘authentic.’

He was married and had a serious boyfriend as well, so he wouldn’t want more than Diana did. But their relationship was open, and so there would be no cheating or secrets from the involved partners.

And from what Neal told her, Peter was definitely good in bed.

And yet.

Agent Peter Burke. Mentor, friend, boss.

Yeah, that last one. 

Boss. 

It should really make her run like the wind. 

Instead, the idea of treating her boss the way a supercilious snob treats the hired help… is really doing it for her.

Christie laughed. “At least this time, you won’t give a little speech about how you don’t actually look down on him because of his income bracket, and you know that social mobility is largely a myth and--”

“Shut up, so I got flustered once,” Diana said, referring to a previous and particularly awkward past attempt to find her occasional guy. But Christie was at least partly right. Diana always felt like kind of an asshole when she asked a working class guy to play out a class-based fantasy, especially a stereotypical one. If someone asked her to get them off by playing up a stereotype of a lesbian, or of an African American woman, she would tell them to fuck off. Unless maybe if it were Christie asking. But Christie probably wouldn’t ask.

But Peter was her boss. And so she wouldn’t be telling someone who made less money than her, who had less power in society than her, to turn their oppression into a role. 

Of course, previously she had never really felt particularly really attracted to him in that way. She had always thought of him as Peter Burke, legendary agent, and then Peter Burke, trusted friend and mentor. 

She had never, ever thought to include Peter in her fantasies.

But now that Christie had brought it up…

The thought of her boss. Peter. Fetching her a towel. Bringing her drinks by the pool. (And yes, she was definitely going with poolboy for Peter). Trying desperately to please the spoiled princess who demanded perfect service. 

Peter, the man she trusted more than any man since Charlie, always confident and competent Peter Burke, apologizing profusely for spilling the suntan lotion. 

Peter Burke, the poolboy, deciding to hell with it. Kissing her, knowing it means that he might lose his job if this spoiled girl complains about him, even if she did insist on it in the first place. 

Kissing a line along her neck, down her sternum, between her breasts. Nervous around her, but wanting her.

Maybe he wanted to take her down a notch. 

Maybe he wanted to prove he was as good as anyone else.

Maybe he just liked it when she told him what to do. Maybe he liked it when she talked to him like he was beneath her, like he needed to be taught how to fulfill her orders. 

Diana really had no idea what it was. But the fact that it was her boss playing the ‘lower’ class role…

It did it for her. 

=====

Diana took her work very seriously.

Which is why she told Christie that Peter wasn’t an option.

But sometimes, when Christie was working all weekend, Diana would lie on the terrace in the sweltering summer heat and imagine that she was at some overly lush hotel poolside.

She would imagine Peter, working hard, trying to do a good job. Good values, raised right and all.

She would imagine his gaze lingering over her, the glances between them an elaborate theater of distance and money and sex. She would imagine Peter licking his lips at her, thinking that she was forbidden fruit.

“You dropped your ice cube, miss.”

“So pick it up.”

**Author's Note:**

> Notes/Warnings(tw): 
> 
> 1\. Includes frank and sometimes problematic discussion of how race, class, gender, and sexuality inform some individuals’ class fantasies. Also includes discussion of a certain kind of class bias within POC communities and its connection to internalized racism. May be troubling or very disturbing. Also mentions other issues of discrimination.
> 
> 2\. Includes a canonically lesbian character that has kink-specific fantasies about working class men. This is not found in canon, but it does sometimes happen that people occasionally have sex with someone of a different gender than usual, even if they identify as gay or straight. Also, the fic is exploring the politics of her kink, and hopefully it plays with the idea the society places a very different symbolic value on the stereotypes of working class men versus the stereotypes of working class women, and that this can affect kinky desires in surprising ways. 
> 
> 3\. The character thinks about ways that her fantasy might be intertwined with some problematic politics, but this is not meant to be kink-negative. I think (hope) that exploring the political/social implications of kinks is actually a very kink-positive act. 
> 
> And: Obviously, I do not think that all wealthy POC look down on lower-income POC, and I do not think that it is the norm for women who identify as lesbians to seek out kinky experiences with men. These were particular to this fic about this individual character.


End file.
